BioBike is an approach to reducing the distance between biologists and biocomputation by providing an integrated, on-line, programmable biological knowledge base. In many other scientific areas, students use programmable tools to address complex questions. For example, most undergraduate engineers are trained to use matlab, a matrix-based programming language, as a tool for thought in engineering. But biologists don't have a tool of that sort, and certainly nothing like that is integrated into their training. BioBike is a sort of matlab for biological knowledge, where instead of matrices you have a knowledge base which integrates biological knowledge about particular organisms, their genomes and proteomes, and which provides tools to conveniently operate on that knowledge.

BioBike itself is a very simple, very efficient biology-specific programming language embedded in an integrated biological knowledge-base, and accessible through the web. In the best case, biologists themselves would be able to log into the system and write their own simple programs to ask novel biological questions without the help of (or with very little help from) software engineers.